Crowley: Saying goodbye is not easy

“Well, here at last, dear friends … comes the end of our fellowship … Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

Life may well be a series of learning to saying yes and no. Life is a series of greetings and saying goodbye.

Saying goodbye is not easy, at times. We face changes in life with mixed emotions, from mixed motives. When our children started to get mobile, I soon learned this was practice for sending them off into the world. After cancer, I have asked myself more frequently about how I wish to spend the precious gift of time.

The answer has led me to accepting a call to being a chaplain at a large retirement center in Indiana. As our lovely younger daughter said, “Oh good, Dad, you will be among your own kind (the elderly).”

As I age, I have gotten more interested in the virtues and vices of aging, the resources we have or need to discover and the vicissitudes of memory. We should not wait until goodbye to tell each other our thoughts of them are good ones.

For me, memory is bound with history. I have loved learning some of the history of the Alton area, of Lovejoy and Lyman Trumbull, the Portage de Sioux treaties of 1815 and the last Lincoln-Douglas debate, of WPA stamps still on sidewalks and flood markers. I do hope that being anchored to the past does not lead to nostalgia for the glory days without referent to the hopes of a new day, of becoming prisoner of the missed visions of the past.

At the same time, I will not miss its grinding, enervating poverty. I continue to hope and pray that some significant employment can come to the area, either from existing businesses, especially across the river and entrepreneurial activity. The growing variety of services require an economic base to sustain them.

I will miss being pastor of First Presbyterian. It is a remarkable outpost of traditional, formal worship, of prayer suitable for adult Christians. Greg Fletcher is stunningly talented. Susie Delano recently retired, but continues to be a tireless advocate to use the facility to help assuage the needs of the community, physical and spiritual. I have officiated at too many funerals and too few baptisms. I will miss having the needs of the people being surrounded by a cushion of prayer.

I will miss walking and biking along the river, especially the palisades. I enjoyed visiting out-of-the-way places such as Dresser Island or Gilbert Lake upriver. (I did learn to say upriver or downriver to avoid my directional confusion in the riverbend area.)

As I said last week, I will miss the access to music that we can enjoy in the area, as well as access to the arts and our world-class library system. I will miss the easy access to the cultural offerings across the river in St. Louis.

I will not miss the attitude of folks on the other side of the river that one needs to plan a wagon train to cross into Illinois, unless it is a magic bus to Fast Eddie’s. I will not miss the constant blame of the region’s decline on “Chicago politicians.”

By the way, as of this writing, I am still trying to sell a couch and a dresser or two.

“Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.” John Steinbeck